How Much Detail Should Be In Product Roadmap?

 

For product owners, creating a product plan is an act of balance, an attempt to reconcile two contradictory facts.

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Fact #1: Developing products are inherently unpredictable, and it does take place. To solve this problem, agile methods have been developed and the values ​​in the Agile Manifesto make it clear that learning is a priority during construction. Scrum's I&A (Inspect & Adapt) cycles are designed to provide us with regular checkpoints where we can adjust our plans to use what we have learned during product development.

Fact #2: Our organizations want predictability and certainty. This fact comes from two sources. First, managers want to know that budgets and investments can produce good results. Second, product development is part of a larger ecosystem that includes activities such as sales, marketing, and, for physical products, packaging, supply chain, and retail partners. Indeed, the efforts of these various components need to be coordinated.

To effectively balance these conflicting facts, the product owner has to deviate from the most popular product plan format - date-based columns with feature lists that need to be populated by these dates.

 

Figure: Standard Format Of Product Roadmap

(Source: scrumalliance.org)

 

This standard format is "the worst of both worlds". It provides too much detail at the job level that goes too far into the future, and too little information about the factors the product owner uses to prioritize and time. We can overcome this conflict by adopting a different product plan format that provides detailed information on the time horizon and adds many other key factors that influence prioritization and scheduling.

In this article, we present three tools that you, as a product owner, can use to better reconcile two conflicting facts of occurrence and the certainty of a forecast.

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Tool #1: Change the Timeframe

The first thing we need to adjust to resolve the mismatch between prediction and voter count is to change the default column headings. So that the first column reflects the shorter period and the columns on the right reflect the longer periods in the same place.

Tool #2: Using Multiple Lanes

Another tool transfers the product plan, rather than simply visualizing the "what" from what and when we create to the contextualization of the "why". We can add a few lanes to the product plan to explain our current thinking about why we do what we do and, most importantly, why it provides features or benefits when they exist. There are many factors that can be useful to visualize in this way, so we will illustrate the factors that we see most often.

·       Target Market Lane

·       Technical Dependencies Lane

·       Market Windows Lane

Tool #3: Adding Graphic Components

Finally, we can improve all these components’ visualization by converting text to images. We are adding three main graphic components to improve the product roadmap visualization: colour, shape, and connectors.

Conclusion

By providing the required level of detail, using a variety of timelines, including key factor bars, and visualizing the relationship between guideline information using visuals, the product owner can reconcile the need for organizational certainty with future natural realities of product development.

The Certified Scrum Product Owner certification course is designed to teach the skills and knowledge necessary to successfully fulfill the product owner role in a scrum team. It includes planning and providing product vision, creating a roadmap, setting priorities, managing scope, and change, maximizing stakeholder satisfaction, communicating effectively with development teams.

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